Building Teams With Complementary Spikes

Peter Dang believes that building the right team is the most critical investment a leader can make—potentially more important than the product itself. He approaches team building as a product, carefully crafting a group with complementary strengths rather than viewing people as interchangeable resources.

When leading product at OpenAI, Peter spent as much time recruiting and building the team as thinking about the product itself. He focuses on assembling what he calls "a team of Avengers" with different superpowers who together create a healthy tension of perspectives. This approach creates balance by having different people obsess over different aspects of the work—some focused on growth metrics, others on design craft and user experience.

Peter developed a framework of five PM archetypes: consumer PMs (half designer, obsessed with craft and details), growth PMs (data-driven skeptics), business PMs (focused on business models and value creation), platform PMs (builders of internal tools and systems), and research/AI PMs (bridging product with technical research). He believes everyone leads with a primary archetype and has a secondary one for balance.

For product leaders, this means you should deliberately hire for different mindsets rather than similar ones. When building teams, identify what capabilities you need to stretch the full spectrum of thinking, then find people who naturally spike in those areas. The resulting creative tension between different perspectives (like the growth PM asking "show me the data" while the consumer PM focuses on craft) produces better outcomes than a team of similar thinkers.

This approach requires leaders to become comfortable with adjudicating differences and disagreements, but the payoff is a team that collectively covers all bases. As Peter puts it: "Everyone's pulling and obsessing over a different thing... you're getting the best outcome when everyone's pulling in different directions."

Leadership Perspective

Peter Dang approaches team building as a product that requires careful design and curation. He believes the best teams are composed of people with complementary strengths who create healthy tension through their different perspectives.

When building teams, Peter looks for people with different "spikes" rather than well-rounded generalists. He developed a framework of five PM archetypes (consumer, growth, business, platform, and research/AI) and believes the best teams include a mix of these different thinking styles. This diversity of thought creates productive tension - for example, between a consumer PM focused on craft and a growth PM demanding data validation.

For leaders, this means deliberately hiring for different mindsets rather than similar ones. When building your team, identify what capabilities you need to stretch the full spectrum of thinking, then find people who naturally spike in those areas. The resulting creative tension between different perspectives produces better outcomes than a team of similar thinkers.

This approach requires leaders to become comfortable with adjudicating differences and disagreements, but the payoff is a team that collectively covers all bases. As Peter puts it: "Everyone's pulling and obsessing over a different thing... you're getting the best outcome when everyone's pulling in different directions."

For ICs, understanding your own archetype can help you identify your natural strengths and how you complement others on your team. Rather than trying to excel at everything, recognize your primary and secondary archetypes and lean into those strengths. This self-awareness also helps you identify what types of roles and companies might be the best fit for your natural working style.